Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Even though the literary trope of the fl?neur has been proclaimed 'dead' on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how fl?nerie takes a belated 'ethical turn' in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault's writings on the 'aesthetics of existence' as well as Judith Butler's notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of fl?nerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan's Saturday, Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold, Teju Cole's Open City, Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Robin Robertson's The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of fl?nerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Fl?nerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the fl?nerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.